Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Deni_debt-free_dreamer

Morning foxgloves and friends

I love a hot water bottle!  I did have to throw away one leaky one so I better stock up before inflation gets to them and they increase in price like everything else has
I have noted down your Icelandic crime series of books and will see if they have them in the library - i love Nordic drama on TV.  I'm watching Beck at the moment and noticed a new series of Borgen is on Nettyflicks - have you watched that - nordic and politics - fab!

Love Deni 

foxgloves

@Suffolk_lass - I'm completely with you re hot water bottles. So cosy, as well as useful for achy muscles when I've overdone it in the garden. I only have one atm & it feels a bit weak in places so I'm going to replace it plus buy an extra one. Low tech & effective. I think thatched cottages look so lovely but I can see that solar panels would be a no-go.

@Deni_debt-free_dreamer - Yes, I like scandi dramas. Hope your library has the Freya & Huldar series as it sounds as if we like similar books & if so, I think you'll like them. I'm on the 3rd one atm, which is called 'The Absolution'. It's been pretty clear right from the beginning that it's to do with past bullying, but I can't properly link it all up at all yet. We loved 'Borgen' & will defo be watching the new series when we resubscribe in Autumn. We've watched all the 'Beck' series to date & have just started on the current one. I also enjoyed a German crime series about a rather unsociable female detective. I can't think of the title but will let you know if I suddenly do.
F

foxgloves

Hello Sunbeams,
Soot & I are in the garden. I'm chatting to you, Soot is trying to stare me into giving him his dinner.
A pleasant day of pottering around. Town first thing for rest of the grocery shopping plus a bit of a stock-up of our medicines box & my toiletries stash. Generic paracetamol tablets @29p. I know all of us on here know about generic painkillers, etc, I mention it only because as I stood in a queue yesterday, there were boxes of branded paracetamol by the till priced at £2.39. My Mum always bought branded. She thought generic tablets wouldn't be as effective even though I once stood in a shop with her & showed her the ingredients were identical. So £2.39 or £29p? Even if the £2.10 saved only goes towards a cappuccino, that's coffee cash which hasn't had to come from elsewhere. In fact, in the supermarket this morning, you could have bought a yellow-stickered pork hock for that & actually had 45p change!
I've planted out a few forgotten cerinthe & free seed-sown penstemon, baked scones - we had a cream tea in the conservatory which felt v civilized & I cast on the first of my planned big warm cardis, having finished knitting my purple socks last night. Saved a bit of energy getting two baths from one fill of hot water & although we'll need to heat up tonight's dinner, there's no effort involved as Mr F made sufficient lasagne last night to feed us for two days. If we feel we 'need' dessert, we can have another jam & cream scone (what an oinker!!)
Hope you've all managed some peace & quiet.....unless your aim was actually a wild weekend..if so, enjoy & have a gin for me!
F x

QueenJess

Generic ones drugs are absolutely identical. When new drugs come out they are expensive and branded as the company that made them needs to make money back on their R&D expenses (can be very expensive to develop new drugs). After some time (can’t remember how many years), the IP “runs out” and then they give the recipe to everyone and anyone can make them. These are the unbranded generic ones which then only want to make some margin on making them, which is why they can be very cheap.

foxgloves

Yes, I have read that's the reason for the price disparity, @QueenJess, & I can understand that drugs companies need to recover their R&D costs. I suppose I'm more mystified that there are sufficient people left willing to pay £2.39 for a box of standard paracetamol (a brand that's been around since I was growing up in the 1970s/80s). There must be plenty of sales at that price though or it would have been lowered. Assume still plenty of people around who, like my Mum, think branded will be more effective & that anything costing 29p for the same amount of tablets can't possibly be as good. I think other non-branded stuff such as anti-histamines & loperamide are also good cheap stock-ups for summer holidays, etc.
F

QueenJess

foxgloves said:

Yes, I have read that's the reason for the price disparity, @QueenJess, & I can understand that drugs companies need to recover their R&D costs. I suppose I'm more mystified that there are sufficient people left willing to pay £2.39 for a box of standard paracetamol (a brand that's been around since I was growing up in the 1970s/80s). There must be plenty of sales at that price though or it would have been lowered. Assume still plenty of people around who, like my Mum, think branded will be more effective & that anything costing 29p for the same amount of tablets can't possibly be as good. I think other non-branded stuff such as anti-histamines & loperamide are also good cheap stock-ups for summer holidays, etc.
F

I think sadly that it isn’t common knowledge though and the drugs companies have no vested interest in actually telling people about it…

I didn’t realise for years until actually someone working in the chemist told me and then later it was further verified when I did some work with a drugs company at work.

foxgloves

I think I discovered it just from shopping around @QueenJess, but it was then confirmed by my sis-in-law who is a nurse. It really used to wind her up that so many people wasted funds getting standard paracetamol as part of their GP prescriptions when they could literally pay 19p (as they were at the time) in a discount chemist. I expect part of it is that people also think of painkillers by their brand name. I've heard people say things like "My head's banging, I need to take a ______" & refer to a named big brand. I suppose that goes to show that advertising has done its job.
F

BlueJ94

Evening @foxgloves

I'm sure I've asked a while ago but I can't remember how long and it would take me ages to find it. But, what's the most hardy/easy veggies to grow? I have a little greenhouse and I do want to start growing tomatoes again but not sure if I have enough space to do so! 

foxgloves

Hi @BlueJ94 - For home grown veggies, you've missed the sowing dates for a lot of stuff. You could theoretically grow a later crop of sweetcorn & can still sow things like beetroot, chard, etc, but tomatoes, peppers, chillies, etc, really need to be sown in Feb & March. You can still sow plenty of salad stuff - rocket, the spicy seed mixes, lettuce, radishes, spring onions.
Another option is to visit a garden centre & see what young veg plants they have in stock. You might be too late for tomatoes - I know our local garden centre sells out quite quickly - but you might find some & then you can grow them on in your mini-greenhouse or outdoors in a sunny spot. You can buy young pepper, chilli, cucumber plants too & pretty much anything else, but as the growing season progresses, garden centres won't buy in new stock as that 'window' will have passed. It's worth you having a look, although it is a more expensive way to grow food than from seed. 
The thing with growing a decent crop of different veg is that it takes planning & I know how busy you are with working long hours across 2 jobs. If you're serious about growing some food, it'd be worth you sitting down in January & making a list of the veg you'd like to grow, do a bit of research about when to sow (the back of the seed packets can be very helpful or look online or get a basic veg growing book from the library) & make a little timetable of what needs sowing when. For instance, it's no good sowing everything in January in a massive fit of enthusiasm only to have everything die of cold........or leave it so late that the plants don't have enough of a growing season left to produce any food (that's why peppers, aubergines, tomatoes, etc, need starting early). Then you can make a list of veggie seeds you need to buy, plus other things like seed compost & can ensure you've saved enough plastic meat/veg trays for sowing into (free seed trays, yay!) & have a supply of pots the right size for potting up baby tomatoes, etc, to grow them on. 
So it's up to you how you progress it. If you eat a lot of salad in the summer, then that's probably the quickest win this time of year.
F x

foxgloves

Afternoon m'dears,
Nice relaxing weekend. Was very restrained at the Swedish Emporium yesterday, largely because I went with 3 things on my list & they didn't have any of them! I bought a couple of big plain white pillar candles to replace an even bigger one that I knocked over & broke and two little 50p glass dishes for standing a pillar candle on. Who knew that such a thing even existed? I usually use a coaster or saucer, then end up having to scrape a load of wax off. 
Very pleasant meal with our best friends....especially as they had baked a lovely sponge, which was served with strawberries, meringue & cream. As the cake was red, white & blue & bedecked with a rather perky cardboard corgi, I felt I'd been at least a little bit jubilee-compliant & it was very yum! Came home with big gifted hosta & pretty geranium as friend is an ace gardener.
So onto today......very little in the way of jobs done. Mr F has had to work to cover ongoing staffing crisis in his team. I put a brisket in the slow cooker at 10 am with a variety of barbecue sauce ingredients & will just need to pull the meat, return it to the sauce to bubble, open a pot of coleslaw & make a salad. Oh & I have promised Mr F we'll have strawberries with the last of the scones I baked, so I must squelch down the garden in a minute with the colander. Rain absolutely all day. The cats haven't set a paw outdoors since their breakfast. I can see that there is some rainwater lying in their tunnel (our cat flap entrance is a short little tunnel through the wall) & I expect they have taken one look at that & been disgusted with how far standards are slipping!
I must make sure I have a really good budget update session tomorrow. It badly needs doing & as it looks as though it's going to be another soggy day, I shan't be busy with laundry or gardening, so can be at my desk with a supply of coffee to do some serious number-crunching. I have finally received that missing problem energy bill too, so I want to have a proper look at that within the context of previous figures & the tentacled projection of what they think we will use this year.
Well, I hope whether you are royalists, or not, or somewhere in between, that you've had at least a bit of downtime time over the weekend & are feeling ready to launch into a new week. Off for a soggy strawberry pick now......at least they won't need much washing.
Bye,
F xx